Conclusion

What conclusion can be drawn from all these changes?
There is a profound change going on now in Turkey. The majority of the population want Turkey to be a member of the EU.

Turkey's possible membership is a very difficult decision for the EU to make. If Turkey's membership negotiations will not start on the 17.12.2004, or they will not progress in the normal way, the EU will have on its borders a very difficult neighbour - a big, poor and unstable country. If the EU will not start negotiations with Turkey, the political and economic crisis in Turkey will deepen.

If the EU starts membership negotiations, it promotes positive development in Turkey and strengthens the position of the civil, compared to the military, sector; for example, it strengthens the position of the government against the National Security Council.

If Turkey will be a member in the EU without the Kurdish question being solved, the situation of the Kurds will be problem for the EU. There have been examples of countries joining the EU with serious conflicts with their own minorities, for example Spain and the Basques, United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. But the case of the Kurds in Turkey is different. To solve the Kurdish problem, a radical change is a necessity in Turkey’s constitution and in the whole way of thinking in Turkey.

All of modern Turkey is based on the ideas of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his ideology of one country, one nation, one language and one culture. If the rights of Kurds as a nation will be accepted, Turkey cannot be a republic of "one nation and one culture". When this is compared to Spain and the United Kingdom, it is clear that solving the problems with their own minorities does not need so radical a change to their administration as in Turkey.

It is self-evident that when a country is based on such ideas which are untenable today, it is only a question of how long it can last. The national awakening process of Kurds started in Turkey during the 1980s and there are no signs that it would subside. Various Kurdish organisations have made
it clear that they do accept the EU's opinion that the rights of Kurds are only the rights of individual people. Kurds want themselves to be treated like a nation, not like a group of individuals. When it is a question of a big group (30 million people), it is unlikely that they would give up and change their minds on such an important issue after many positive developments in other areas.